Exploring Spinvis; The Unconventional Sound of Erik de Jong
Spinvis (Erik de Jong) is a Dutch artist, who’s music is hard to categorize in a specific genre. Some even say that Spinvis is his own genre, but his music comes most close to the genres; experimental Lo-Fi, experimental pop, neo-psychedelia, alternative indie and even a bit of modern dance and electronics. The music is composed through sampling of different sounds, which vary from sound samples of computers and even sounds composed by differing attributes, such as pot lids, a whistle and a keyboard. The texts of the songs cohere with these sounds and are almost poetic and supported by the melancholic voice of Erik. The first album, “Spinvis (2002)”, can be characterised as the most alternative and makes mainly use of computer based sampling, attributes and sensational song texts. From his third album on, “Dagen van Gras, Dagen Van Stro (2005)”, he is accompanied by his band. The corpus that will be studied is a sample of different songs of Spinvis, which will be compared to a sample of different songs that are of coherent genres of Spinvis. The playlist ‘Spinvis project’ was made and consist of different songs of every album made by Spinvis. In addition, a second playlist ‘Spinvis project genre’ was made, consisting of a random selected sample of songs by coherent genres. Both the playlist will be analysed to try to distinguish what specific features of Spinvis can be heard and if these features can be found in the different genres playlist. I expect that many features of Spinvis can be found in many different coherent genre songs, since it is hard to assign Spinvis to one specific genre.
The Scatterplot shows a distribution of both the playlist of how happy and danceable the songs sound according to Spotify. What can be seen is that overall all songs are very scattered. However, all songs are almost evenly categorized in how danceable they are. The songs of the Genre playlist seems to be slightly more categorised as sounding happy. The song Right on time of the genre playlist is the most danceable and sounds the most happy. The song Onder Woorden of the Spinvis playlist is the less danceable and sounds the least happy.
Can Spinvis songs be categorized into different genres?
The two playlist that are compared in both graphs are a Spinvis playlist, only containing songs of Spinvis (Category: Spinvis project) and a playlist with songs that are in overlapping genres with spinvis (Category: Spinvis project genre). Both graphs show the measured features and belonging values. The first plot shows a bargraph in which little differences can be found. The biggest difference can be seen between the categories and features of ‘Liveness’ and ‘Valence’. Meaning that the songs of Spinvis are less featuring liveness compared to overlapping genres, but are more featuring valence.
In addition a second graph was plotted. Given that the playlist of only spinvis songs is compared to a playlist of several songs that all are from different genres overlapping with spinvis. Meaning that it is interesting to look at also the means and how these fluctuate and show very different results. Both for spinvis as for the category genre, both have many outliers fluctuating eatheir down or up. For valence you can see that both the maximum as the minimum in both categories is the same but the mean is much different.
The B-side (Doris Day)
The song Doris Day, is originally from the Dutch pop group ‘Doe Maar’. Songs were characterized by a mixture of reggae, pop, ska and Dutch vocals and formed a unique style of nervous, puncky pop songs. The group formed the emergence of the genre “Nederpop”, a genre Spinvis is also associated with. In 2012 the collaboration album Versies/Limmen Tapes was released, which contained some of the best known songs of Doe Maar with a twist. [Doris Day - Rapversie](https://open.spotify.com/track/1yoS3M2rBgDVfWh807OTv5?si=be3f6ce902cc4215 is one of these songs, a collaboration between singer Sef, Spinvis and the group Doe Maar.
Can we capture the sound of Spinvis
Tot ziens, Justine Keller In the context of the song “Tot Ziens, Justine Keller” by Spinvis, the Cepstrogram provides insights into the spectral characteristics of the audio signal over time. By visualizing the cepstral coefficients, the Cepstrogram can reveal patterns and changes in pitch, timbre, and other spectral features throughout the song.
Interpreting the Cepstrogram requires some understanding of signal processing and audio analysis techniques. Generally, areas of higher magnitude or intensity in the Cepstrogram may correspond to prominent features or changes in the audio signal, such as musical notes, vocal inflections, or instrumental passages. Applaus
Capturing Patterns; Spinvis and Genres
Timbre based Self-similarity Matrices: to see structure of the songs
The Key to Spinvis
The songs that are seen in the Chordograms are: Voor Ik Vergeet (Spinvis)
Hemel Valt (Typhoon)
Let It Happen (Tame Impala)
What can be seen is the song of Spinvis shows a less clear pattern, and spotify seems to think that the song have come to an end at 220 sec. Also spinvis sound is mostly in c# minor, Ab Major and Db Major. Typhoon has a very clear pattern in his song and is mostly in the keys F Major and F Minor Tame Impala has a less clear pattern, around 100 sec is a small decrease. Around 250 sec till 300 sec there is also a moment spotify is not sure how to analyse. In the song (starting from 3:50) there is a soundsequence that is probably hard to analyse for spotify, given the big yellow part. Furthermore it is hard to say in which specific key the song is played.
Tempo Tales of the Astronaut who learned to Breathe
A Fourier-based tempogram of the song Astronaut is shown. An attempt to analyse the tempo of the song is made, by using Spotify’s API. An estimation made by Spotify is a tempo of …. In some freer-form sections of the piece, tempo estimation is almost impossible.
To compare the the temporal features of the song, another Fourier-based tempogram was conducted of the song Breathe In, Breathe Out. Which shows that Spotify made an estimated tempo of ….
Can we cluster what we know?
exploring Spinvis; The End.
Both the playlist will be analysed to try to distinguish what specific features of Spinvis can be heard and if these features can be found in the different genres playlist. I expect that many features of Spinvis can be found in many different coherent genre songs, since it is hard to assign Spinvis to one specific genre.
This corpus, tried to give a graphs overview of how the artist Spinvis can be categorized by features distinguished with Spotify API. In addition, an overview was created of the same features in coherent genres to Spinvis.
weaknesses of the corpus: A weakness of the corpus is that for the corpus, many different songs are examined strengths of the corpus: interesting results overview: discussion/conclusion: